


Shuffling the Deck

by Ladybmorebelle



Series: Wanting it All [1]
Category: iZombie (TV)
Genre: Coming Out, F/F, F/M, Fluid Sexuality, Polyamory, Questioning, polycule, sharing is caring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-13 18:50:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15371040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybmorebelle/pseuds/Ladybmorebelle
Summary: Liv doesn't know who she is anymore. But she's beginning to know what she wants.





	Shuffling the Deck

It was stupid, really.

She had almost gotten used to being other people all the time. Being undead isolated her for so long - from her friends, her family, from Major - and so sharing her mind with murder victims was almost like a few stolen moments of not being alone. If she was someone else, she had a companion. If she was someone else she didn’t have to be herself.

But somewhere in all those brains, in the recipes, the gelatinous texture, the ghost pepper hot sauce, Liv Moore grew accustomed to multiple voices at all times. To never truly being alone. And each new voice was different, with different tastes and desires and likes and dislikes, and she would wake up in the morning with cravings for strong, hot coffee she never learned how to make. She’d be in the shower and reach for gardenia scented soap - but find her customary, canary-yellow lemon verbena. She’d remember the cream and chocolate of tiramisu in Veneto, or the earthy huitlacoche in Sonora, or the lightning flash of cocaine in a nightclub in Berlin, and it was her, and it wasn’t. It was all those other people - people who were dead. Who she consumed.

Trips she never took and lips she never kissed, and her, Liv, aching with nostalgia for a life she would never get to live. 

So it was stupid, the first time she looked at Peyton and saw something more. 

Peyton, who was so beautiful that she left a horde of stupefied men in her wake - who had an oddly angular face, a little harsh, that went soft with insecurity. Long legs, tiny shorts, thick socks, hair that went flat a little too easily. Liv had held Peyton through breakups and blackouts and never once had she thought, damn, I could climb her like a tree.

Until she ate a quiet librarian, who wore thick glasses and shy smiles, and who was crushed down in the stacks by a jealous ex-lover. Librarian brains had read both the dictionary and the thesaurus and could describe in exquisite detail exactly what she could do to Peyton and how long she would rest between those elegant thighs.

It was a great relief when a new body arrived at the morgue. But she couldn’t help but remember the mousy librarian, and every time she walked into a bookstore she would breathe in and grow warm with pleasure at the smell of paper and book binding. 

All of these minds - sometimes it felt like shuffling a deck, and she was just a shoe at a casino, cards rotated and revealed and replaced. Each new set of brains brought a personality into focus, but even after that personality had faded there was something that remained. A shadow, a whisper. And she couldn’t look at Peyton the same way - she saw the architecture of her flesh and wanted to lick every inch. 

The raw force of human identity coursed through her, and that naked mortality felt like a drug. She could escape. She cut into new bodies and weighed organs and found causes of death; she reached her hand out, just a little, towards Major, who was always pulling away; she watched Zombie High with Peyton and gazed at her under her eyelashes; she looked at Ravi over a pint of beer and wondered how soft his beard would feel against her face.

Humanity was full of desires, all sorts of them. And so was she. 

Back before - before death, and gore, and regret - her life had seemed so clear. She was driven towards a future she’d planned out long ago: become a doctor, marry a nice boy, have two kids. Age, but gracefully. And now, even though she wanted a cure more than anything, she had to admit to herself that she couldn’t go back to that person, the Liv who wanted normativity. One type of job, one type of partner. Her tastes were more diverse, and she longed to be fed. 

How could she give up this new life, the unlife, which offered pleasure and pain in equal measure? 

Sexuality was a stupid term for what this was, and it wasn’t a phase, and she didn’t think she could ever come out. She tried on a few labels, silently - bisexual, pansexual - and thought about her gender - which was more fluid than ever. And in the end she always shrugged because who she was had very little to do with what she called herself. 

She ached for Major. She wanted him, in every way, in every moment. 

She thirsted for Peyton.

Her heart melted for Ravi.

And did it matter, in the end, who she was? What name she used, what card came out of the shoe? All of those other personalities had left their imprint, and the act was disgusting and unsettling and stupid, but maybe it was also a gift. 

Olivia Moore stood in her bedroom. She was damp from the shower, wrapped in a lavender towel, and the air was cool and humid. She caught herself in the mirror, a pale figure in the dark. She was hungry - not for food, but for touch and companionship and laughter and sex, and she let the towel drop. She was swollen and ripe. She looked at the shell which held her in, her impossible, boundless mind, her unnatural humanity, and she thought, fuck.

It’s all stupid, really. 

But whatever name she called herself, she wanted, deep down in her core. Complex wants and simple ones - love without limits.

She was never going to be alone again. So maybe she could figure out how to be with the people she wanted most.

**Author's Note:**

> So, just got into iZombie and I flat out love everybody and think Liv/Major/Ravi/Peyton would be the cutest polycule. This is an intro piece to that possibility. Plus who among us would not want to have some sexy fun with at least a couple of them?


End file.
